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Deep Down: the 'intimate, emotional and witty' 2023 debut you don't want to miss

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In one finely wrought section during a family holiday to Spain, 13-year-old Tom is privy to an awful altercation between his parents in the supermarket. When the narrative loops back to the protagonists’ earlier lives, her observations of the nine to five are hilariously unforgiving: “At work, Billie spends most of her time with Martin, her direct superior, a lumpy man of about forty-five with back problems that he refers to as often as possible.

If you like stories of family, friendship and the power of grief I certainly wouldn’t be saying no this novel!

Our understanding of the characters is quite limited to their relationship and history with their father. Billie and Tom are not necessarily likeable characters, but as the story progresses with flashbacks to their childhood we start to understand why they’re a bit messed up and have such a tense relationship - they’ve both processed their father’s behaviour in a different way and are therefore handling his loss differently too. To be fair, I picked it up at a friend’s house but after 20 pages or so I literally threw it across the room. What West-Knights does so effectively here is to make no distinction between past and present; incidents from childhood are related in the same continuous present tense as the current events in Paris, with nothing so clunky as dates or chapter headings to mark the switch.

The novel is a serious and very accomplished examination of what it means to love and grieve for someone who might seem unlovable. For me, the highlights of this book were the Paris location and the friends and family who surround Billie and Tom - they brought joy and lightness where there wasn’t much. Away from the ‘tourist bit’ of the catacombs – the part filled with bones moved from the city’s cemeteries – is an extensive network of claustrophobic pathways beneath the everyday, visible level of the city.Billie, who has a ‘plain, mashed potato sort of face’, lives in London, while Tom (a failed actor, whose only success was in a Christmas advert) has moved to Paris to work in a bar. The story is about Tom and Billie, they have both had a bereavement in the family and seeing as they both are so far away from each other they decide to reconnect and hope that being together will help with the grief. Such crispness could have given the narrative a slightly sneering edge, but West-Knights’ quiet focus on the vulnerability of her lead characters grounds the novel in a more humane place. Billie's chair screeches and she begins to pick up bits of a jar with a careful thumb and forefinger.

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